Improvements in computing technologies have changed the way people accomplish various tasks. For example, some estimates indicate that between the years 1996 and 2007, the fraction of the world's population that uses the Internet grew from approximately 1% to approximately 22%. Irrespective of the actual percentages, trends suggest that the Internet will continue to grow.
Along with the growth of the Internet, users and service providers have developed numerous applications and corresponding interfaces to facilitate the exchange of information. For example, a politician may give a “victory speech” after he has been announced as the winner of an election, and just as he is getting ready to deliver the speech, those in the audience, which may include the media/press and supporters of his campaign, may each use a digital video camera to shoot footage of the speech as it unfolds. The audience members that shot the video footage may each upload the video footage to a respective user account or the like associated with a commercial server thereafter for purposes of saving the video footage, freeing up memory on the digital video camera for future use, and allowing friends, family, or more generally, other computing users to view the video.
More generally, recent success of media sharing services has increased the amount of media content available on the Internet, yet the media content remains largely disorganized and characterized by low/poor quality. Users often waste time and become frustrated when they are forced to consume low quality media content and when they must review multiple versions of the same event to determine which recording is the best.